Jackie's Journal (8th Excerpt)
(Week: 11, GM: Lee, Player: James Beech) April 2016 East Stark, ND In most ways that matter, the world has already ended. More than a month without sunlight, and the crops that should be newly sprouting are rotting in the fields. The forests themselves are starving. The only animals that survive are the carrion eaters and the ones we choose to feed. When the canned food starts to run out, then the wars will begin. Already the army is stretched thin, trying to keep order. There were more than 38 million people in California before it sank. Now the cold is killing them, even as they huddle in the desert. Frost in Death Valley. Communications are down. And the darkness does something to people. They're quicker to anger, hungrier, and reckless because they have no hope. Whatever happens at Arcadia, the world as we knew it isn't coming back. But tonight, I just don't care. We went down to Nevada, all three of us, in answer to a tip off from Queen Mab. People had been disappearing from a refugee camp. It was the first time in a while I'd gotten to really see Tom. He's been gone, hunting down more scraps of prophecy. He thinks we have to go to Arcadia to stop this madness, maybe that Arcadia is even behind it. Anyway, I was glad to see him, until he asked about last month's hunt. I didn't have the guts to tell him about Rollo and Anna. SM Helena Rogers was with us too (along with a greenhorn named Ozzy) which was useful, since the camp was being run by the army. Some investigating proved that the camp was harboring a dangerous Ukrainian scientist and his army of cyborgs who'd been forced out of his secret lab in California. Fortunately, the cyborgs had enough of a mind for me to talk to, but it turned out that they weren't behind the disappearances. Instead, the cyborgs had come into conflict with the servants of the Dark Lady, a powerful sidhe who was plotting to use the chaos to establish her own faerie court in the mortal realm. We found the door the faeries had been using to sneak into the camp and we slipped through into Faerie. There was a crowd of hobs and sprites waiting to pounce on us, but none of them seemed to want to tangle with Tom and his holy sword. Then Ozzy happened to stumble upon the path that led straight to the Dark Lady's bower. Elliot talked circles around the vain sidhe and got her to reveal her evil plan. What she wouldn't reveal was where she was keeping her prisoners, but Ozzy traded his first born son (I didn't know that was a thing people did anymore) for that information. She actually showed us a seeming of them, half-starved and bleeding from torturous wounds. At felt the rage boil up in me at the sight, and Rollo flung himself at the Dark Lady, jaws agape. The others piled in and we overwhelmed the sidhe before she could call for her guards. Ozzy actually got the killing blow, after which the Lady's servants seemed to accept him as they master. The problem was that with the Dark Lady to hold her demesne together, this corner of Faerie was collapsing. Ozzy's new minions got the prisoners out and we ran like crazy for the portal. Well, most of us ran. I was being carried by Tom. The Dark Lady had hit Rollo with something pretty nasty and the psychic feedback had left me pretty wobbly. As we neared the Portal,Elliot slipped. Tom flung me ahead of him, out into the real world, but there was no way he was getting out in time. He turned back, reaching out for Elliot, and then the portal slammed shut on them both. I broke. Anger and fear, those Rollo understands. But guilt? But grief? They paralyzes us both. Fortunately, Helena kept her head. She used the note Mab had sent us to call on Winter. The Winter Lady appeared and reopened the portal. Elliot sprang free. I could see Faerie disintegrating and crashing down behind them. But somehow Ezriel, Tom's guardian angel, had gotten trapped in there with them. And Tom...well, Tom had lost two angels already. I suppose it was too much to ask him to lose a third. He saved Ezriel. Faerie collapsed. The portal closed. Tom died. This was worse than anything. Elliot was screaming, pounding their hands against the empty air where the door had been. I could see the rage, the infection in their wounded soul, growing, taking them away from me too. And then... And then there was a miracle. Elliot's soul came rushing back to itself. I stared in dumb incomprehension. I did not know that miles away Luiz and Morgan had just helped the goddess Artemis avenge her brother's death by killing Lucifer. I just knew that I had Vegas back. They staggered and fell and I went to them. I put my arms around their shoulders, as they had done so many times for me. And then... And then there was a a second miracle. A rip in the worlds opened and Tom stepped out, sword and eyes aflame with the fires of creation, carving his way out of Faerie, or Purgatory, or God knows where and back into the living world. Elliot ran to him and he held them in his arms. And I could only stare. And as I stared I felt...not only joy, though joy was there, hot and fierce like a bonfire, but also something for which I have no name. A certainty, deep and steely, that these people were mine and a part of me. That nothing and no one else mattered if they were well and whole. And that there was nothing in any world that could take them from me and live. I think I understand Rollo now, for the first time. I have gazed upon the place he comes from. Not fear. Not rage. But certainty, deep and steely. In most ways that matter, the world has already ended. But tonight, I just don't care. I have what is mine. Death and the Devil were not enough to take them from me. I'd like to see Tezcatlipoca try.